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User blog:HowStrongIs/Lyn's Speed (Fire Emblem)
Lyn is one of the fastest characters in the Fire Emblem series, having some of the most over the top critical animations out there. While these can't be definitively quantified, due in part because of gameplay abstractions and the fact her height comes from a secondary canon source at best, it can be at least somewhat quantified, even if the result is questionable. In this blog I am going to be measuring her speed during three of her attack animations. Those animations being the following. Lyn attack animation 1.gif Lyn attack animation 2.gif Lyn attack animation 3.gif As you can see, there's a bunch of individual parts to these animations. Each part can be calculated to get its own value. This is unfortunate for me, because that means I have to do more work. But it's fortunate when it comes to consistency, because this means we can get a clearer picture of Lyn's abilities, even in spite of the possible scale issues. Because there's so many individual calculations to be done I will be dividing this blog into 3 sections, one for each feat. I'll also be doing them in the order they're presented in in the above gallery, rather than in order of how impressive they are. ---- Lyn attack animation 1.gif The first part of this feat that can be easily quantified is Lyn making afterimages next to herself. Why Lyn likes to run back and forth in the same pose really fast is beyond me, but whatever works for her. We know that Lyn had to have been moving back and forth at least every thirtieth of a second, since the full blur is made in a single frame. Provided Lyn is 1.79 meters tall the rest of this feat is just scaling. In this scene Lyn is about 45 px tall, while the distance between the afterimages is 90 px. This conveniently works out to just twice her height, about 3.58 meters. However, this isn't all the distance she crossed. She must've moved into the position of one image then back over to the image of the other. Had she moved only 3.58 meters she would've just ended up back where she started. This adds another body height onto the distance she crossed, bringing up the total to 5.37 meters. Crossing this in a thirtieth of a second comes out to 161.1 m/s. The next part of the feat is much less complicated. Lyn comes in from the side of the screen in a blur and then attacks the enemy. We already know Lyn is 45 px tall in this scene, so really we just have to measure to where she landed from the edge of the screen. Doing this shows she crosses about 220 px, 4.89x her body height. Or about 8.75 meters. This motion takes 4/30ths of a second, which comes out to 65.63 m/s. A bit faster than an arrow. The last part of this feat is extremely complicated and I have no idea where I'd even begin to quantify it. Visually, at least, it seems only a bit more impressive than the first part of the feat. It's likely around that value, but probably no more than twice that. ---- Lyn attack animation 2.gif This sequence is pretty simple, just like the above. It's made even simpler by the fact only one part of this really needs to be calculated, and that's her approach to the enemy, which takes place over the course of one frame, or a thirtieth of a second. We can see that in this video Lyn is 60 px tall, and the distance she moves is about 70 px, or about 1.17x her height, 2.09 meters. Crossing that in 1/30th '''of a second comes out to '''62.7 m/s. Once again a bit faster than an arrow. ---- Lyn attack animation 3.gif There are three parts to this animation. The first part is Lyn doing the "jump back and forth" thing, which looks slightly less impressive than the similar feat already calculated above. The next part of the feat is Lyn making several afterimages around the enemy, which is what I will be calculating, and the last part is Lyn disappearing from sight and finishing the move. I will only be calculating the second part of the feat because the first one has essentially already been calculated and the third part is unquantifiable aside from "a bit faster than the second part". That said, the results for the second part should be fairly high anyway. Anyways. We can see in this scene that Lyn is 63 px tall. Soon after she disappears from sight she jumps around the enemy, making five afterimages appear in, once again, a thirtieth of a second. To find the distance she crosses to create these we can measure the distance between each of her "heads". Doing that adds up to 396.1 px, or about 6.29x her height, 11.26 meters. Crossing that much distance in a 1/30th of a second comes out to 337.8 m/s, which is just below the speed of sound. ---- Result *Lyn's Speed (Feat 1) **Part 1: 161.1 m/s **Part 2: 65.3 m/s *Lyn's Speed (Feat 2) **'62.7 m/s' *Lyn's Speed (Feat 3) **'337.8 m/s' ---- Potential Problems With This Calc *The height for Lyn comes from Smash Bros., which is at best secondary canon *The scale in the game may just be an abstraction (Though personally I think it makes sense) *The last feat, being a series of afterimages, is pretty much reliant on, well, tricking your eyes. The timeframe may not be literal, and she may only need to go through the "cycle" once every few frames or so rather than once every frame. ---- Potential Problems With The Result *Lyn's speed in the last feat seems like it borders on being an outlier. Though, admittedly, putting it through an outlier calculator does show that while it is the farthest from the rest of the data it isn't a significant outlier. ---- Notes *I did not get acceleration and, from it, force. I didn't try to get acceleration because that would require some iffy assumptions on my part. In addition, it's likely that Lyn is accomplishing this through short jumps, which would make her acceleration so massive as to be meaningless at this scale. Because of this I couldn't get force either, but even provided I did make a few assumptions it would still get ludicrous results that imply Lyn is able to output hundreds of thousands of Newtons with her legs, easily making her one of if not ''the ''strongest human character in the setting. It should be obvious to anyone familiar with the series why this isn't the case, given there's people in her own army stronger than her. Category:Blog posts Category:Calculation